It was the crucifix from the oratory, the crumbly remains of a wreath of long-dead flowers still affixed with faded ribbon around the scarred head of Christ. Flowers Benningsgate’s priest would have laid. Or perhaps even the lady of the keep, Patrice.
But how did the crucifix come to be . . .
Constantine glanced at the triangle of daylight beyond the pile of rubble, thinking of the woman who had come upon this place so ill and weak; the only person who had been determined enough to attempt to enter the place his wife and son had lost their lives through the cruel evilness of the man she had married. And even as fragile and unwell as she had been, Theodora Rosemont had wrested the crucifix from the wall of the oratory and somehow managed to bring it over the treacherous path through the ruin to lay it at the threshold of the place where his family had been left without ceremony. To try as best she could to make a proper tomb for his little boy. Spoiled, horrid Theodora Rosemont, Glayer Felsteppe’s wife.
She’d been the only one who cared.
Constantine swallowed down the thorny lump in his throat and crawled on through the black chasm.
Chapter 12
Constantine would have vowed familiarity with every twist and turn within Benningsgate’s keep. But being trapped in the narrow gap of the collapsed stairwell was like trying to navigate a foreign shore at night. He flipped over onto his back to slide through a particularly shallow opening between slabs of charred red stone, and as the solidness of the masses pressed against both his chest and his back, for a moment he had the panicked sense that he didn’t know up from down. If the rocks shifted the tiniest bit from his movements, he would be killed.
Or perhaps not killed, only pinned under tons of rock, the breath squeezed out of him little by little for hours or maybe days. Imprisoned, just as in the dark cell in Damascus.
The thought caused him to freeze in his movements, as if already trapped, and he could feel the perspiration causing his tunic to stick to his skin as surely as if he’d walked into yonder river. That idea in turn called to mind Theodora’s dead father, the drowned Lord Rosemont.
But he shook himself. Christian was inside the ruin somewhere. He and Patrice lying alone in such a sad, desolate place for years without him. Still waiting for him. He could not fail them again. And so he shoved down the panic when his next deep breath was arrested halfway, and used the anxiety to fuel his motion through the gap.
He turned his head to look up and ahead of his path and saw a line of daylight. Pushing once more with only his toes in the narrow place, Constantine’s head inched from the crevice to emerge in open air, the sky suddenly blue above him through the gauzy curtain of high, sheer cloud. Black darts swooped and circled through the column of charred stone, diving diagonally to and from their secret nests tucked practically inside the injuries of the keep.
Constantine craned his neck to look beneath himself and saw the square of rubble that had settled into the foundation of the tower keep, perhaps fifteen feet below his head. Wriggling to the side, he withdrew first one arm, then the other, from the crevice and reached above to find handholds, mindful of the fact that any downward pressure he exerted on the detritus in the doorway could cause it to collapse fully on his lower half. He pulled tentatively at first, trying to allow most of his weight to remain on his back while he slithered from the gap. Once he could slide his right knee out and gain a foothold with his boot, he drew a deep breath, gripped the stones with his fingers, and stood in one sliding movement.
The stones held, even though he did hear the crumbling, skittering sounds of pebbles running mazelike around him. He looked down the steep wall to the rubble below—too far yet to jump. He’d break his leg at the very least if he landed upon something solid. Worse, if the debris shifted. Constantine turned his head to look down his right side and saw the jagged, black remains of a wooden beam perhaps two feet below and one foot farther to the right than his boot. It was just what he needed to move in a zigzag fashion to the bottom of the doorway. He slid both feet as far to the right as his perch would allow, and then, hanging on with only his left hand, he stepped out and down with a quick intake of breath.
He lay flat against the stones like a spider, balancing awkwardly on the jagged end of wood that was already crumbling, collapsing like a sponge beneath his sole. He looked back to the left at the narrow ledge of masonry threshold just deep enough for his fingers. Constantine closed his eyes for a moment, the side of his face against the cool, damp stones. Then he looked once more to the ledge as his left arm slid down the shallow depressions in hitches. He was only perhaps a foot from reaching it now. He took a deep breath and let his body fall.
His left hand slipped off the threshold and his arm swung away. He couldn’t help his shout of alarm as his right hand arrested his fall, and he quickly brought his left hand up to cease his wild swinging over the floor. He dared to look down again and guessed that the soles of his boots were perhaps ten feet above the rubble now, and so he inched to the left, the toes of his boots scrabbling against the wall for purchase until he was suspended over a wide-looking, slanted piece of rock. Then he let go.
The drop was farther than it had appeared, and his right knee twisted before his legs buckled to the unevenly resting stone slab. His shout of pain echoed up in the jagged column of the ruin, startling the birds from their hidden nests and sending their panicked tweets bouncing inside the keep. Constantine rolled to his back with a groan, bending his right leg and raising his head as his hands went to his knee. He hissed as he extended his foot along the stone and then drew it back again; he didn’t think it was broken, just turned. And so he scooted back to a sitting position, his hands braced to either side of him and looked around.
He’d never thought to be in this hall again. Especially after he’d heard of the fire that had destroyed Benningsgate. But here he was, the only person to have entered this place since the night Glayer Felsteppe murdered Patrice and Christian. He was finally where he should have been these many, many years.
The rubble was deep—Constantine knew from the height of the lone window above him that the debris had filled at the very least the first floor chamber abutting the gatehouse below the slope of the ground outside the wall. The doorway he’d slid through into the ruin had belonged to the antechamber leading to the great hall itself and the corridor of apartments belonging to the family. He’d dropped somewhere midway into a receiving room, which led to the lower corridor in the bottom half of the wall. Had the way been clear—and the west wall still intact—Constantine could have trod the entire length of the passage beneath the wall walk to the oratory.
Had Theodora Rosemont returned there after leaving him to his macabre duty?
Constantine looked up again to the narrow opening in the wall some thirty feet above his head—the window that had decorated his great hall. It held no colored glass now, only the remnants of last summer’s vines. Then his gaze fell back down to the rolling field of jagged stone before him.
How much of the keep walls lay atop the layer of the hall floor?
Constantine stood up, favoring his right knee, and limped across the rubble to the center of the space and turned in a slow circle, his eyes taking in the remaining walls, up to the pinnacle of the stone as it stretched toward the bright sky around the island of wreckage on which he was now marooned. Nothing slid, nothing shifted. The stones were packed in solid with their weight, baked in place by fire and the suns of summers past, solidified by rain and snow and wind. Not a speck of material that had not been chiseled from the earth could be seen. No wooden beams or floor boards, no charred furniture, no bleached scraps of tapestry.
No white bones.
“Where are you?” he whispered to the shadows crouching beneath the stones.
Was he just to leave his boy here, his wife? Could he allow them to lay where Glayer Felsteppe commanded they fall?
Constantine dropped to his left knee, stretching his right leg out before him. He picked up a stone the size of a round of bread in both his hands and hefted it there for a moment, feeling its weight as he looked around himself at the thousands more like it. He tossed the stone to the left with a huff, and it tumbled and bounced across the field of debris until it came to rest near the wall.
Then he picked up another.
* * *
Dori sat in the yard for hours, leaving her post only a handful of times to fetch a drink of water or to seek the tall weeds later to rid herself of it. She’d gained the wall walk twice, placing her hand upon the remaining wall of the keep and pausing to hold her breath and listen. She thought she’d heard a rhythmic scrape and tumble of rocks, little more than whispers of sound on the wind. But there had been no shout of alarm, no plea for help, and so she’d gone back down to her hard seat in the ward.
Likely Constantine Gerard wouldn’t have called out even had he found himself in dire straits, whether because his injuries prevented it or because he didn’t wish to be rescued. She thought he would choose instead to remain in the open-air crypt that was Benningsgate Castle. Dori didn’t know how long she would have to wait in the ward for his return.
